From the Vault

from Walker Magazine | Fall 2021

by Daily Mountain Eagle

50 Years of Indian Creek Youth Camp

Vau From The

SCHOOL PRIDE FROM THE PAST

Compiled by Jennifer Cohron

1) An undated photo of Dora High School graduates

2) Miss Walker County Leigh Sherer presents awards for academic achievement to outstanding students participating in her weekly MUSIC (Music Underscores Success in Children) program in 1995.

3) Cordova High alumna Regina Holsombeck, who had owned 24 Corvettes throughout her life, used to drive one every year in the CHS homecoming parade.

5 6

7 8

4) Alabama Forestry Commission Ranger Tunney Markham, botany instructor Ben Wall and zoology and anatomy instructor Dr. Allen Rowland stand near a tree on the then-Walker College campus called “the learning tree” in early 1986. It was a rooted cutting from a tree found on the Greek island of Cos where Hippocrates lectured in 400 B.C.

5) Curry High School cheerleaders circa 1983

6) Jerri Nuss, right, president of the Walker County Council of PTAs, moderates a forum in May 1986 that involved quizzing 12 state and local candidates on their views on matters involving education.

7) Garry Neil Drummond served as the commencement speaker in May 1994 when the fi rst class graduated from UAB Walker College. He is pictured with Walker College Chairman Al Simmons.

8) Mercedes-Benz President Andreas Renschler is greeted by T.R. Simmons students waving German fl ags on his visit to Jasper in April 1994.

The Pregnancy Test and Resource Center is a nonprofit pregnancy center offering free and confidential services. We strive to serve with excellence and offer a nonjudgmental atmosphere.

THINK YOU MAY BE PREGNANT AND DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO? CALL US.

1707 2nd Ave., Jasper, AL 35501 • www.ptrcjasper.org • 205.221.5860

Open Monday–Tuesday 9am–4pm, Wednesday 8am–2pm, Thursday 9am–5pm

The Pregnancy Test and Resource Center is a 501.c.3 ministry that operates primarily through donations of individuals, churches, and businesses. Donations of new or gently used baby items up to size 2T are accepted. Volunteer positions are available.

We offer

FREE

pregnancy testing, ultrasound, and information on pregnancy options, a clothes closet, parenting classes, and more!

Man Versus Mountain

JOSH GATES AND HIS DREAM OF EVEREST

Text by Ed Howell | Photography submitted by Josh Gates

Josh Gates of Jasper, at 39, had reached great success with Saturday Down South, a sports media enterprise, with the freedom to travel and enjoy life. Being pinned down 3,000 feet below the top of the 29,000-foot Mount Everest, with hurricane force winds forcing him and his companions to hold down their tents, would not seem like a reward. After weeks of effort, he and others were bogged down, with the temperature at 35 degrees below zero - not factoring the winds. Up on Everest, Gates could see the top of the peak in the cold and the wind, on the other side of the world after spending weeks on a trek. That moment, standing on the peak on the top of the world, would soon be taken away, and he would make a journey downward that was as perilous as he could possibly ever imagine, for

himself and the other climbers who joined him. While he said it was in some ways like any other mountain, “the scale of something that is almost 30,000 feet tall and just the extreme conditions, and having to be in those extreme conditions for two months. It lives up to the billing. It was an incredible experience.” For a normal peak in the U.S., Gates might go for two days to two weeks with a friend. “But for the bigger mountains (around the world), I go with a group of about five to 10 climbers and maybe a couple of guides,” he said. Seven climbers would start in the group for Everest, but two left in time due to injuries. Two guides and probably a dozen Sherpa helped at different stages. For Everest, one has to plan for years, and one practically has to have a resumé to justify you even being there. “I went with a pretty elite climbing group, so all of us were well experienced and versed to be there,” he said, noting a guide service is required for Everest, which also handle logistics. “You can just focus on climbing, and that’s just the way to do it,” he said. “Everest is kind of a unique variable where you actually have support from Sherpa,” an indigenous community in the Nepal region which helps guide climbers on Everest. “That is a 2 1/2 month trip so there is so much gear,” much of it that the Sherpa will help to carry. However, for his own personal effort, he thinks he carried about 55 pounds of items. Unfortunately, the whole world was focused on COVID-19 last year, when he was originally supposed to go. The whole mountain was closed down, and his 2020 trip was canceled 10 days in advance, and he waited until this year. (He noted everyone in his 2021 party was vaccinated against COVID-19, although some of the Sherpa were not, and people would keep some distance when possible.) He said one starts at the base camp, which is about 17,600 feet tall. “You stage from there and you spend the next month and a half moving up on the mountain to higher elevations and then coming back down,” he said. Rest and recovery is needed along the way to produce needed red blood cells to survive and breathe higher on the mountain. He was on Everest from the first part of April until June, so it was in the 90s going to the base camp. “You do a weeklong trek to base camp. You have no roads,” he said. “You have ox carrying a lot of gear and you are carrying gear. But it is a beautiful scenic hike through the wild mountainous region of Nepal.” One goes from village to village, staying at tea houses. The number of climbers was greatly reduced this year due to the pandemic travel restrictions and fears, meaning happy villagers welcomed his group with open arms and tears. “We had a whole tea house to ourselves,” he said. Base camp has a huge infrastructure in itself, Gates said, although due to the pandemic, teams were not interacting with each other. “Base camp is about a mile-long narrow strip in this valley between these 8,000-meter peaks,” he said. “You have individual tents to sleep in. You have a kitchen. You have a dining tent, and you had tents for the Sherpa.” The base camp never got above 40 degrees and at night would be in the teens. One travels through the Khumbu Icefall, with huge blocks of ice and glaciers that fall constantly, he said. “It’s pretty intense. You climb that to Camp 1. You spend the night and then you come back down. Then you rest for a day or two, and you climb back through it and go back to Camp 1 and then Camp 2, and then you come back down. You keep doing these elevators, so of speak, for about six weeks. “One, you are positioning gear. Also, you are giving your body time to really evolve to the environment. You literally double your amount of red blood cells,” he said. “You have to push your body to these higher elevations, expose your body, let it know you need more (red blood cells) to live, so you usually spend the night or spend the day, and then you climb back down and give your body a chance to recover and actually meet the demands you are going to put on it later on.” If a plane or helicopter were to drop you off quickly on the top of Mt. Everest, you would only live two or three minutes before dying, he added. Oxygen supplementation is used to help climbers. “It helps you keep your core warm,” helping against conditions like frost bite, he said, as well as helping keep you mentally sharp. “As you get higher up, with a lack of oxygen, you are more sluggish and lethargic, and you are not sharp mentally. Oxygen kind of helps alleviate some of that,” starting at about 23,000 feet. “On the last rotation, when you are going for the summit, you are usually on oxygen the whole time, even when you are sleeping.” Going up, he felt well prepared. But Everest was a threat, as he noted you are so high and on narrow ledges, making the reality of death being ever present. “You are always a mistake - failing to clip in or tie in - you are a mistake away from death, even though it is not that extreme,” he said. “Driving home today is very dangerous if you decide not to pay attention.” He said there is a mental focus and one is always dealing with dangers. “You are super dialed in to make sure you don’t make mistakes. You are looking out for other people. You are paying attention to the environment. There is a lot mentally when you are climbing Everest that is different from other mountains,” Gates said. Yet that could not prepare him

for something that he said has never happened in the modern history of climbing Mt. Everest. “You had back-to-back cyclones, which is what they call hurricanes that hit,” he said, as two came within a week of each other. With a storm coming on the coast of India, eventually winds and snowfall came and created avalanche risks. “The winds and the blizzards that go with that are incredible, especially when you are 20,000 plus feet up on a mountain,” he said. “You are totally exposed when you are living in tents and moving on sheer faces, it is insane. It is pretty crazy.” The first cyclone came just before the team made its summit rotation, which is when one moves up continually to the top, and the team waited a week in base camp for the storm to pass and for ascending climbers to move on. Another 150 climbers were caught halfway up for seven to 10 days due to the storm, staying in tents and running out of food and oxygen. Climbers had to be sent down to resupply them, he said. He noted too it is dangerous to be stuck in place because without moving your body doesn’t generate heat to warm itself, leading to multiple problems that can lead to death. While his team waited below, another, much larger cyclone formed from the tropical storm system. “We had this window of time,” he said, noting one only has about three weeks from mid to late May to summit Everest for the entire year. “We were all stir crazy. It is a bunch of type A accomplished climbers waiting to go,” but stuck waiting for the storms at a critical time, he said. “We decided we would shoot the gap,” to go up before the second storm hit. “We knew we wouldn’t be all the way down before the second one hit, but we thought we could at least summit before it did. And we could figure out getting down from there. “And we almost made it,” he added with a laugh. The team got to Camp 2 with no issues, and then to Camp 3 with beautiful weather, except for some “gusts that would almost knock you off your feet.” Then they moved on to Camp 4 - the camp where one then starts for the summit. Most of the earlier group had summited and were passing Gates’ group as they were descending. Ahead of the five climbers and two guides were four or five of their Sherpa who had been to Camp 4 to get it ready for the group. They and two other climbers were the only ones on the mountain. “It was perfect conditions. We had all of Mt. Everest above 23,000 feet to ourselves,” he said. “That’s unheard

of. It was beautiful, sunny weather. It was cold and windy, but it was beautiful blue skies.” The group reached Camp 4 at 26,000 feet at about 1 p.m. with no issues, although they were tired. Going from Camp 3 to Camp 4 is probably the most demanding part of the whole climb, he said. Radio contact with base camp communicated that some weather reports indicated that the cyclone could possibly hit below Camp 4 and not hinder their progress to the summit. “There are tents there. It’s very remote. We were going to rest for about six hours,” Gates said, with plans to make the summit push at about 9 p.m. “We had a very strong and fast team, so we could have probably summited in five to six hours.” Gates and another member even had plans to summit Everest, come down to Camp 4, traverse over and summit the neighboring peak, Lhotse, within 24 hours. “Only like 20 Americans have ever done that,” he said. Then, the plans unraveled. Within 30 or 45 minutes of reaching Camp 4, the outer band of the cyclone hit the camp. Temperatures dropped significantly. The threshold for making a climbing attempt were sustained winds of 30 to 35 mph, “which is almost insane but it’s doable.” Gates can only estimate, but he feels when the outer bands hit, it was more like 60 mph, or at least hurricane force winds, and the winds brought ice with it, like a blizzard. “Basically, we were in a situation where we couldn’t leave their tents,” he said. “The winds were too high. We thought we were going to lose our tents. We didn’t sleep for two and a half days. Everybody just kind of held on to their tent and hoped for the best. But there were rumors and reports intermittently that there might be breaks and gaps in the winds in the storm. “And again, we just needed the winds to come down to 30 to 35 miles per hour for about five or six hours, long enough for us to summit. And we could almost - if we could get halfway down from the summit within that window of calmer winds, it was doable.” He saw on the neighboring peak the storm would linger for days and they had no supplies to do that, so he gave up on the second peak. “But we’re just trying to summit Everest. We’re just 3,000 feet away. You can see it. It’s right there. Sticking your head out of the tent as far as you would go,” Gates said. “You can’t walk around. It was really cold and you were on oxygen continuously at that point. So we sat there for two and a half days.

“Everybody was completely healthy, feeling great, ready to go and just at a certain point, the winds were just going to continue to get stronger for four more days,” he said. “We were almost out of supplies.” Moreover, by this point in the expedition, a couple of Sherpa and a couple of climbers had to leave early due to injuries. Another Sherpa had a death in the family and had to leave. “So we had a depleted Sherpa staff that was having to do the same workload as if they were fully staffed, so they are exhausted. Our guides at a certain point said, ‘It’s not going to happen,’ which was devastating,” he said. “He stumbled into the tent and you knew what he was going to say right away.” And that led him to have to process that he had gotten so close and worked so hard, and still missed the final goal. “We had been climbing up and down the mountain for six or seven weeks,” he said. The actual climb from the base camp to Camp 4 had taken three or four days, sometimes with sleep of only four or five hours. They had been stuck two and a half days at the camp waiting for the weather. Worse, they realized that they could not stay at the camp. “We had to climb down in that storm. That was pretty extreme,” he said, noting one could just barely see enough in the storm. “You’re just trying to stay on your feet. And you are having to do all the technical climbing you had to do to get up there in reverse going down, which is much more difficult.” Meanwhile, one climber in his mid-50s had extreme issues that started quickly after they left. He was unable to stand on his own and lost his “mental acuity” a little. “He wasn’t thinking straight and wasn’t communicating well. He kept pulling his mask off,” he said, as it appeared the man was coming down with altitude sickness and had the potential for frostbite. “He was completely snow blind. The wind and the snow actually do something to your retinas at that altitude and those conditions, where you actually go blind temporarily. You can’t see,” Gates said. “It is also totally disorienting, so it was a huge problematic situation. The only remedy for that is to get down out of that environment as quickly as possible. If you don’t, it can become permanent blindness. This was a huge problem. One of the guides got a short rope and tied that climber to himself, and was manhandling him down these super technical [slopes] - you have like a sheer face that is like 10,000 feet, say,” as well as walking narrow ledges. They also have to clip into ropes and climb down. “It is hard enough by yourself, but if you are having to manhandle a fully grown adult male, as well, who is also doing erratic things, it is difficult,” he said. Because of his condition, the man could suddenly jump, turn or fall randomly. At this point, there are five climbers and two guides, with one guide devoting his time to the erratic man. Gates is up front with one guide. Meanwhile, the other guide and the erratic man are going slower, separating them. Gates said they needed to push quickly to get down, knowing they needed to be active to be warm and avoid frostbite and death. “And once you ran out of oxygen, you are on a timer, too,” he said. “At this point, we are only carrying one bottle of oxygen for each climber, and there is no resupply. If you run out of oxygen, you are up at a high extreme altitude - the death zone is what they call it - and you can’t survive there longterm without oxygen.” If they were to run out of oxygen, they would need to move down quickly, as staying put would kill the person. However, the separation complicated the escape. “We get just above Camp 3 after many hours, many more hours than it should have taken,” he said. “We had lots of guys starting to get the beginning stage of frostbite, where your toes and fingers are just gone. So we were trying to figure out a way to keep warm, but we realize we had

to wait for the guide and this other climber to catch up to us. The weather condition was too extreme to leave them by themselves. We’re going to have to help each other to get down.” Tents had been left behind in the camp, albeit buried in the snow, with only the tops visible. They dug out a tunnel and a couple of climbers went inside the tents to get warm, as they were having a hard time finding warmth. Gates and the rest of the group waited outside for the guide and the erratic man to arrive. “One of the Sherpa had caught up to the guide and the climber who was having trouble at that point. But he was snow blind as well, so he couldn’t

see, and he was just stumbling around,” Gates said. “Coming down from Camp 3, I actually had to help him repel down and help him to Camp 2, because we didn’t have enough guides to keep up with everybody, so I’m just trying to help out.” In the end, he said it took “all day” to get down to Camp 2, which is safer because oxygen was not needed there and it is a more stable environment. “Altitude sickness, frostbite, snow blindness - the remedy to all that is to get to lower altitude. He said it should have taken four hours to get down. He wasn’t sure how many it did take, but estimates it may have been six to eight hours. The party spent the night at Camp 2, and left the next day for the base camp, he said. With rest that night, the man acting erratically was able to have an almost full recovery at Camp 2, including getting a clear mind again. “He was totally exhausted. His body hurt. He was tired. His eyes bothered him. But he was able to function to be able to get down,” Gates said. Oddly enough, Gates had no problems and felt fine the whole time. “It was validating, because I was prepared and fully able to function and climb,” he said. “I felt fantastic the whole time.” However, that physical ability did add to the frustration of being within 3,000 feet from the summit and not being able to go. “But it was a cool experience, and it helped me to come to grips with not making it to the summit, because I realized how impossible that would have been. Having to actually climb in that weather, you realize that that was the right call. Otherwise, I would have been haunted by that decision. I’m still not happy with the decision, but it was the right decision,” he said. But he would like to try again. “It’s an unchecked box. I feel like I got 95 to 98 percent of the Everest experience,” Gates said. “It’s tough to take the time and treasure to do it again, but I want to be able to say I summited Everest and not just I climbed Everest. But I don’t know if that will be next year or five years from now.” He noted it didn’t feel like a failure because he felt validated in being there. “I was never pushed beyond my limits, so there is no doubt I could have gotten to the top,” he said. “It’s all about the journey anyways. It’s all about everything that happens from here to the summit, not necessarily the summit itself.” While he said the first thing anyone asks is about the summit, “the trip is where the value is.” •